


The Curse and Right of Thieves

by SpaceJackalope



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Family Feels, Gen, Grandparents & Grandchildren, I imagined this very vividly so now you have to cry too, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Life and death and feelings, Missing Scene, Multi, Old Gods, Sad but not mean I think, post-Return of the Thief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:33:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27074290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceJackalope/pseuds/SpaceJackalope
Summary: "It is the curse of thieves and their right to fall to their deaths, not--not--" [The Queen of Attolia]In which Eugenides arranges matters to his satisfaction, and his family holds each other up.
Relationships: Eugenides & his family
Comments: 16
Kudos: 53





	The Curse and Right of Thieves

It was always going to be excruciating. 

~~~

Alytadoros of Attolia felt his lover’s hands on his face, callused and steady. He couldn’t look him in the eye, not yet, instead fixating on the tiled floor below their feet, repeating abstracted laurel leaves. “I don’t want to go,” he whispered, his voice harsh with unshed tears. “I can’t--I can’t live with myself if this is what he asks of me.”

“He’s not asking you to kill him, sweetheart.”

“Might as well be.”

“Everyone dies someday. Would you want him to be in pain forever?”

“Not forever, just--a little longer. I know it’s selfish, I just, he can’t die without being proud of me.”

“ _Fiore basso_ ,” Ilario murmured sweetly, kissing the top of Alytadoros’s head. “I am so very certain he _is_. Who could not be?”

“But I haven’t _accomplished_ anything. If I go home now, they’ll send my diploma after me, and Grandfather will be dead by the time it arrives, and I won’t have built a thing. I need him to see that I finally got it _right_.”

Ilario tried again to lift his chin, and this time Alytadoros let him. “You are not the libertine princeling I met on the snowdrop hill.” The Attolian laughed a little and put his arms around Ilario’s waist. A minor nobleman named for a long-dead friend of his Attolian grandfather’s, Alytadoros had heard Ilario sing before they were so ignominiously introduced. It was a mercy that he didn’t know how well the man could fence, or Alytadoros might have burned his remaining dignity and skipped out on their duel. Instead, they clipped each other--Alytadoros wounded on his cheek, Ilario on his bicep--and their assembled friends had insisted they would have to go to second blood for a clear verdict. Alytadoros, once disarmed, leapt on Ilario to attack thin skin with his teeth, and Ilario (good-tempered and weak for a pretty face) burst into breathless laughter, dropping his sword and scrabbling with the prince until he agreed to yield, both of them red-faced and oddly shy. The prince knew his heritage, and commissioned snowdrop earrings to begift the goddess for whom he was named.

“So, so, so. I have met you, and stopped drinking, and finished school. It shall have to be enough. I would have had to face him soon anyway.”

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t pay my respects to Grandmother.”

“No.”

“Will you come with me? To Attolia, I mean.” He put his hands atop Ilario’s. “I would marry you if I could, but all the same--will you come with me? If you cannot bear the Little Peninsula, I will return to Ferria with you, but I want…” his breath hitched again, and this time it seemed he would never be right again, not in his throat, nor his lungs, nor his heart.

“I rest my head where you rest yours. Of course we must go to Attolia, love. Besides, it is the land of my patronym. I think I would have ended up there even if we’d never met.”

Alytadoros brushed imaginary lint off of Ilario’s immaculate shoulder. It was hard to show gratitude for generosity, when he could not have borne its absence. “I know it’s not on the same level as the Greater Peninsula, for your career.”

Ilario laughed. “Darling, I’m a musician. I can work _anywhere_.”

~~~

The whole family embraced and kissed him, and then noticed Ilario standing patiently to one side, and caught and kissed him as well. His mother held Alytadoros at arm’s length, searched his face and brushed away a happy tear, saying he looked very well. His father was stroking a new little beard and trying not to look too intimidatingly at Ilario. The siblings and their spouses were eager to see his diploma, disappointed to hear it was waiting on a seal from a senior lecturer on sabbatical, and then proud again. His sister Heiro handed him her new baby. Alytadoros had been a surprise, born years after his parents thought their family was complete, and was a very practiced uncle. He bounced the baby and said that it was good he’d been named Ion for his grandfather, as he looked so much like Heiro’s in-laws. 

Five years ago, when Alytadoros’s grandfather had found him sobbing on the rooftop and wrapped his bony arms around his youngest and most reckless grandchild, Annux Eugenides had said, with every appearance of sincerity, “Well, at least you’ve never dropped a baby.” Then he poked the young man’s side and said: “Your turn. Say something nice about yourself.” Alytadoros had, after some thought, offered that he was good enough at mathematics that even Baron Erondites was proud of his pupil. They had traded for some time, until Eugenides, stroking Alytadoros’s hair, began to hum softly. The Thief made him get to his feet and do an Eddisian square dance, and when he was done spinning his grandson until the wind of the motion had cooled his shame-hot blood, it had not seemed so strange to be asked if he would like to go to study on the continent, nor so impossible to say that he wanted to be an architect.

Philomelis, Alytadoros’s eldest brother, caught his arm and whispered, eyes glittering, that he ought to introduce his friend properly before their father ran out of polite ways to imply that he was happy for them, if that’s what was going on, he wasn’t trying to pry... Alytadoros laughed and handed baby Ion to him instead, putting an arm around his lover and assuring his family that yes, this was the young man he’d written about, Ilario Erondites, and let’s see, was that first cousin once removed from “Uncle” Pheris? And a new round of kisses and slaps on the back began.

~~~

He’d hoped to begin with Pheris. The great polymath had rocked him as a baby, and was as cherished as his parents and aunts. He could, in his own way, be more intimidating than the great thief, king, and hero who had sired Alytadoros’s sire, but he was also easier to predict. His siblings always teased him for being intimidated at all by Pheris, but it was only that he loved the man so much, wanted so badly to do right by him. None of them had his anxious disposition. Perhaps Philomelis understood best, the oldest and youngest children always having extra eyes upon them. 

The Baron Erondites had a lover of his own, a decades-long relationship with an astronomer from Brael. He fussed over the prince’s healthy glow and gave him a sympathetic smile when he explained that Pheris was with His Majesty. Alytadoros had to face them both at once. Pheris had been partly raised by Eugenides, or that’s how he told the story, for all that they had perhaps a decade between them. He signed a warm _hello_ at his former pupil’s entrance, from his wheeled chair on the far side of the king’s bed. They both looked older than Alytadoros remembered, but a great weight left his chest as he came out of his bow, searching their faces and seeing no sign of agony, or of unfamiliarity. Pheris looked frail but well, and Grandfather--he simply looked tired. Again, the prince wondered if he could be persuaded to stay. 

Eugenides patted the bed beside him, and Alytadoros sat, dangling his boots away from the covers, to be hugged and kissed as he had been dozens of times as a small child, visiting his grandfather for a bedtime story. He felt safe and quiet in Eugenides’s arms, and forced himself to admit that this was what he was most dreading; never again being folded up in Grandfather’s embrace, inhaling beeswax and the orange oil he used from his clothing. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to memorize it, only succeeding in bursting into tears. “Do you really have to?” he burbled.

“Oh, sweet boy. I felt my god give me leave months ago, more than a year ago, and I have placed my feet with exceeding care every day since. I’m tired of it.” At the silent question, he smiled tenderly and admitted, “I simply couldn’t leave her alone. I promised her on our wedding night that I wouldn’t.” Attolia Irene, whether through the drop of goddess’s blood in her veins or her own sheer stubbornness, had lived to a very great age, and had seen many of her friends buried. She passed in her sleep without a final illness, and once all the family was assembled, Eugenides would follow, and his ashes be laid to rest in the same tomb. 

Alytadoros sat up and dried his face. The three of them tried to talk as if it were a happy occasion, the graduate’s homecoming. He filled them in on events since his last letter, the frantic weeks of final exams and the euphoria of being done at last. Ilario, agreeing to follow him to Attolia. His grandfather made a great show of putting on little spectacles to read the piece of parchment that informed Alytadoros Attolides that he had completed his course in architecture, ranking 3rd among his class, and could expect his diploma by such and such date. Eugenides and Pheris applauded and made embarrassing noises about how quickly he’d grown up. 

The high king looked into his youngest grandchild’s face, and, finding the light in his eyes much calmer than when he had entered the room, squeezed his hand. “Would you be very cross with me if I gave you your first architectural commission?”

“So long as it isn’t nepotism, Grandfather dear.”

“Not a bit of it,” the Thief countered haughtily. “The royal columbarium is a bit crowded. Will you make us something new? Just for Irene and me, or with an eye for the future--your choice.”

The site seemed obvious to Alytadoros at once, a hill in an orchard among the throne’s holdings that looked to the sea in one direction and the mountains of Eddis in another. He described it, and the particular way he wanted to leave it open to the views, the new style of dome he wanted to use, and how it might be decorated in a way resilient to the elements. He opened his eyes, stepping out from his rapture, and saw Pheris grinning fit to split his face. Eugenides’s face glowed with pride. It was a little bit alright that he would never see Alytadoros’s first work, for all his descendents had learned from his lap how to spin castles in the air.

~~~

Alytadoros’s cousin who was Sounia sent a parting gift to the Thief of Eddis, a pair of earrings in the form of hoops with a tiny acrobat on each, one bracing himself within the circle and the other dangling upside-down by his knees. He laughed until tears of mirth ran down his cheeks, and declared that he would wear them (as she had doubtless hoped) to his last party. Aunt Eugenia returned from Eddis the same night, and then they all had to contend with knowing the hour and the day. Alytadoros lay in Ilario’s arms and did not sleep.

Eugenides walked through the palace, passing through favorite rooms. He lingered in a receiving chamber with ugly murals of the Battle of Hemsha, a wicked, private smile on his face. The library and kitchens received longer visits as well, and then he sat in the garden until the sun set. His last party had been planned in detail. There was a great feast with the whole court, who knew nothing more than that the royal family and the king’s physician seemed drawn and solemn. Then a private party, Eugenides surrounded by his family and intimate friends, laughing and drinking in the royal apartments. Stories were told, both true and myth. Grandfather requested all his favorites, ending with the story of his namesake, and his daughter’s and grandson’s namesake, the God of Thieves. They sang a little, and Attolis asked Ilario to perform his own grandfather’s song about the king’s wedding night. He did, undeterred by the covered ears and embarrassed, shouted protests of the subjects’ children. Eugenides sang along, which was not an improvement.

When they had all run out of breath and steam, but not out of merriment, the room still brimming with affection shared by the occupants, the Annux of the Hephestian Peninsula rose to his feet and advanced to his bedchamber. Alytadoros ended up by the window, with Ilario’s arms around his shoulders, right hand joined with Pheris’ left and his own left hand in both of his nephew Genny’s. There was his father, his mother, Aunt Eugenia with Aunt Nikolette kissing her forehead, Philomelis, Sophia, Alexios, Heiro, their beloveds and children, and the handful of honorary uncles and aunts so important to the fabric of the family. 

Eugenia drew her shoulders back and produced a small wooden box of crumbled earth, which she scattered across the bedclothes. Philomelis and their father produced a stepladder, the sort intended for libraries--which, admittedly, the bedchamber strongly resembled. “Are you sure it works like this, Daddy?” Eugenia sounded almost amused, but her face was reflective, as if looking into her future and considering the possibilities.

“If that bastard doesn’t count it, then we’ll all go to the roof and I’ll swan dive into the orange grove.” Everyone except Eugenia and Genny winced. 

Eugenides let his children, heirs to his legacy both, hold the ladder steady. He looked out above Pheris’ head, through the window that faced his birthplace, and drew himself up. He wore the earrings from Sounia, and a suit in cheerful yellow and warm gray. He plucked the crown off his head and plopped it over the curls of Attolis Hector. He bumped Eugenia’s cheek playfully with the flat side of his hook, where they bore matching feather-shaped scars. He murmured something in archaic. “Oxe harbrea sacrus vax dragga onus savonus sophos et ere.”

Gen spread out his arms, inhaled deeply, and, onto soft blankets and Eddisian soil, fell.

His god permitted it.

~~~

It was always going to be excruciating, but it was his wish and his right, and when his family looked into his smiling face, they laughed through their tears. It was the smile of a Thief who had run until nothing could touch him.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a scene I imagined very vividly, partly inspired by a deleted scene from Stardust (2007), and I am unspeakably glad it is not actually in Return of the Thief. But I spent so much time thinking about it that now I needed to inflict it on others, like ya do.
> 
> With particular thanks to storieswelove for egging me on. ("Also if you write that Gen death scene you’re both a monster and a hero.")
> 
> You can find me at cartograffiti.tumblr.com, or jackalope.pillowfort.social
> 
> Did you know there's a Queen's Thief Discord server? It's true! We're at discord.gg/NGet6q6


End file.
